πάντα ῥεῖ / Everything flows, No man steps in the same river twice.
The state of becoming does not produce fixed entities, such as being, subject, object, substance, thing. These meta concepts are a product of consciousness and language, we employ them in order to interpret the chaos of the state of becoming.
Philosophy since the Greek philosophers falsified the testimony of the senses and negated the evidence of the state of becoming. By postulating being as the underlying reality of the world, they constructed a comfortable and reassuring “after-world” where the horror of the process of becoming was forgotten, and the empty abstractions of reason appeared as eternal entities.
Goethe’s view of nature was dynamic, processual, and holistic — he saw nature as an unfolding whole, where form and change are inseparable. His Urphänomen (primordial phenomenon) concept refers to deep, formative processes behind appearances.
Prigogine, similarly, rejected static, mechanistic models of nature. He emphasized process over structure, and becoming over being. His work on dissipative structures showed how order can emerge from disorder in far-from-equilibrium systems — such as life, ecosystems, or societies.
The future is not given, it has to be created.
Classical physics (Newtonian and even early thermodynamics) treated time as linear, reversible, and external — essentially a parameter. The past and future were symmetrical in physical laws.
Prigogine challenged this:
- He showed that irreversibility is fundamental, not just a statistical outcome.
- In far-from-equilibrium systems, time introduces creativity: new structures can emerge.
- He thus placed time at the heart of physical reality, not as a backdrop but as a productive, asymmetrical force.
- For Prigogine, time is real, directional, and creative. It’s not a straight line ticking away but a medium through which novelty and complexity emerge.
He coined the phrase: “the end of certainty” — suggesting that determinism and timeless order must give way to a new science of becoming.
- Prigogine’s theories echo Goethe’s organic, developmental view of nature.
- He builds a non-linear, processual concept of time, rooted in thermodynamic irreversibility and open systems.
- Time, for him, is not an illusion or neutral background but a real, creative force shaping the universe — much closer to Goethean becoming than to Newtonian being.
Influence :
1. Isabelle Stengers: Bridging Science and Philosophy
Isabelle Stengers, a philosopher of science and co-author with Prigogine (notably “Order out of Chaos”), helped translate his ideas into philosophical and political contexts.
- She emphasized that science must abandon timeless, detached objectivity and instead recognize situated, evolving processes.
- With Prigogine, she argued for a “science of becoming” — where irreversibility, contingency, and emergence become central.
- Stengers also critiques the reductionism of classical science, echoing Goethe’s holistic intuition.
“We must learn to think with time, not against it.” – Stengers
Her work laid groundwork for eco-philosophy, ethics of care, and alternative cosmologies, especially in feminist and postcolonial thought.
2. Deleuze: Becoming and Difference
Although Deleuze developed his philosophy largely independently, there is strong resonance between his ideas and Prigogine’s thermodynamics:
- Deleuze’s ontology is based on becoming, difference, and multiplicity — not static identity.
- In Difference and Repetition, time is non-linear: he distinguishes between Chronos (linear time) and Aion (a time of pure becoming).
- Deleuze rejected the idea of a pre-given order. Like Prigogine, he saw the world as a field of creative differentiation.
Later Deleuzians (e.g. Manuel DeLanda) explicitly tie complexity theory, emergence, and nonlinear systems to Deleuze’s metaphysics.
Both Prigogine and Deleuze articulate a world in flux — open, creative, and always becoming something new.
3. Ecological and Political Thinking
Prigogine’s vision of open systems has influenced ecological and systems thinkers like:
- Gregory Bateson, Fritjof Capra — in seeing life as a network of self-organizing processes.
- Bruno Latour, who integrates Stengers’ ideas into his work on Gaia theory and political ecology, where agency is distributed, and nature is not passive.
- Timothy Morton’s “ecology without nature” draws on similar post-reductionist views of entanglement, complexity, and time.
In ecology, Prigogine’s framework helps us think of nature not as static “balance” but as dynamic, unstable, and creative — requiring co-adaptive ethics rather than control.
In essence:
Prigogine’s time-as-becoming helped:
- Undermine classical determinism.
- Open science to process, contingency, and novelty.
- Provide a scientific backbone for philosophical concepts of difference, emergence, and relationality.
- Inspire non-anthropocentric ethics in ecology and politics — focused on interdependence and open futures.